Firefox’s selective tab restoration after a crash is a handy feature, but if you’re suffering repeated crashes for whatever reason, then being told “Well, this is embarrassing” every single time can get really wearing. Here’s how to make it go away.
Ideally, I’d have liked to find a way to customise that too-clever-by-half message, but I couldn’t spot any obvious way of doing that (share one if you have it in the comments). However, you can tell Firefox not to offer the session restore option at all, which can be a reasonable trade-off if you don’t routinely have dozens of tabs open at once.
To make that change, enter
about:config
and click through the “Here be dragons” warning (another example of Firefox being a tad too clever). Use the filter to find the
browser.sessionstore.resumefromcrash
flag, right click, and select Toggle to switch it off.
Wobble
Tuesday, September 29, 2009 at 1:50 PMThat’s strange, I’ve never received that message.
Elly Hart
Tuesday, September 29, 2009 at 4:54 PMMe neither.
Rodney Fiddaman
Tuesday, September 29, 2009 at 7:09 PMYou’re lucky then. Mine crashes every time I try to open a PDF file. I guess I really should look at that!
Michael
Friday, July 2, 2010 at 9:36 AMI get this error all the time.
They should stop being so embarrassed about it, and actually fix it.
poedgirl
Tuesday, September 29, 2009 at 3:20 PMIt can be pretty annoying – especially since now my home PC seems to want to crash Firefox about every hour. No matter what pages I have open, disabled all extensions and plugins, still does it.
Nil
Tuesday, September 29, 2009 at 3:29 PMI’d like to turn it off but I actually have lots of tabs open at a time. The strange thing is, I get that message even when Firefox doesn’t crash.
I close a Firefox windows with no tabs open and occasionally it tells me it can’t restore the blank tab when I open it again.
Jini
Friday, October 2, 2009 at 5:42 PMwow, thanks a lot!
mine also shows the message, even when firefox didn’t crash. I get the message every time i open up firefox. Even when i closed without tabs open . . .
i also have this weird things, then when i close firefox without any tabs open, and start it up later, it opens up with tabs :S know how to fix this problem too maybe ?
Selavn
Wednesday, November 4, 2009 at 6:22 PMI need the fix but had no browser.sessionstore.resumefromcrash entry. So it would be of additional help if you could include those needed steps.
Until you, do, I’m going to tinker around and hopefully figure it out.
Kenny
Monday, November 9, 2009 at 5:04 AMDoes not work
Kenny
Monday, November 9, 2009 at 5:08 AMOk, I figured it out. Type:
browser.sessionstore.resume_from_crash
Zack
Tuesday, December 1, 2009 at 11:43 AMI to have the problem of this error message popping up whenever FireFox closes, crash or not, actually I have very few problems with it crashing. But I do have a FireFox problem I have been unable to fix, whenever I close (on purpose, or “accidentally”)lke accessing it with a link from my mail package (Thunderbird), I cannot reenter FireFox without rebooting the system. This, to say the least, is very frustrating. I can leave it open in the background, but my fickle finger movements (and my mouse is not helping either), but that of course is NOT an ideal situation. HELP!
pete
Wednesday, July 7, 2010 at 6:16 PMIts pathetic that Firefox posts the message about how embarrassed they are each time Firefox crashes. They should stop posting that sentence and actually become proactive to fix the issue that is causing the crash. They need to show some responsibilty and actual concern instead of telling me they are embarrassed each time it happens.
martin gugino
Thursday, August 4, 2011 at 2:58 PMthanks for the info. I will give it a shot.
Bruce Korb
Saturday, October 15, 2011 at 2:27 AMRats. When I boot up from a shut down, I *WANT* Firefox to come back up with the same pages. I was hoping I could get it to do this without having to click, ‘proceed’ every time. It seems Firefox takes the SIGTERM signal as an error instead of a shutdown request.
Ben in Seattle
Tuesday, March 20, 2012 at 12:55 AMBruce is completely right! That means anytime you log out or shutdown without quitting firefox first, it’ll think it crashed. Unfortunately, it looks like nobody has submitted a patch to fix it to Mozilla yet, https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=336193
mIKE
Saturday, March 3, 2012 at 6:43 PMAll these “new” versions seem to be getting toooooo big for their britches!
Let’s get back to simplicity, Please.
Mario
Sunday, March 4, 2012 at 1:44 PMThe best solution was change Firefox and use Opera. No more crashes or embarrassments.
Jan vdP
Monday, April 9, 2012 at 9:55 PMMy sister-in-law looked shocked, a bit blushed and said: ‘It says that I did something embarrassing.. i did do nothing …’ Well, thats also a a way to interpret the message.